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Old Posted May 9, 2008, 12:17 AM
babybackribs2314 babybackribs2314 is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2006
Location: UWS, Manhattan
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1,000,000,000 is unreasonable... I'm not qualified to guess, but I'd say that something in between 500,000,000 and 700,000,000 is definitely possible. Roughly doubling our current population would definitely be feasible, with the biggest increases occurring in the Northeast, Southeast, and Midwest, where water is plentiful. I'm not sure about how much food we produce but I'd imagine we could easily provide for over a billion people.

Things going for doubling the population include our relatively high birth rates here (overall it's around 2.1, which is replacement rate, but it's increasing), and immigration... I'm guessing there won't be the kind of mass migration of today in 2100 because more countries will be wealthy, but through 2050 we'll probably recieve another hundred million immigrants, at least.

Even with 600,000,000 people, the US still won't be that crowded... unless everyone wants to live in the suburbs, which is probably unlikely.
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